K Jeter - Noir

“I already knew that,” said McNihil. “But you still haven’t told me what the word means.”

“Don’t worry.” The Adder clome smiled. “Where you’re going, you’re likely to find out.”

“All right.” McNihil knew there weren’t any more answers here. “Get out your knives.”

The burn ward at the hospital smelled of disinfectant and the pumping cylinders of sterile machines. I wonder what it smells like to him , thought Harrisch, watching the asp-head walk down the white corridor toward him. In that world that McNihil walked around in, saw all around himself, the deep monochromatics of old and forgotten movies layered over the bright, shiny, and uninteresting real world… Harrisch supposed the hospital odors might be translated to simple carbolic acid and iodine and hot, soapy water. The new stuff, most of which was manufactured in some DZ subsidiary factory, worked almost as well.

“You tracked me down,” said Harrisch, smiling as the other man approached. “See? I knew you still had it.”

“I’m not in the habit of losing things.” McNihil looked tired, his face stiff and puffy, as though from bad sleep and an alcohol-toxic liver. “Unlike some people.”

Harrisch felt his own brain stall, unable to produce even a minimal retort. The hospital’s whispering silence and industrial atmosphere oppressed him; he would rather have met up with McNihil anywhere but a place like this. McNihil’s suggestion; it struck Harrisch as being typical of the gloomy bastard. Corporations like DynaZauber, and the execs in the boardrooms, couldn’t afford to be as dark and antilife as some twisted little independent operator with a history and agenda of self-defeat. It’s a Darwinian thing , Harrisch figured. Only the corporations and the execs who embraced life, swallowing it whole in their sharklike, all-devouring mouths, survived in this world. Any other one, he wasn’t interested in.

“You look like hell,” said Harrisch.

“That’s how I feel, pretty much.” McNihil prodded the side of his face with one fingertip, like a sculptor testing the consistency of wet clay. “I thought maybe around here, I could bribe a nurse and score a little relief. Maybe a little morphine or fentanyl. Even paraldehyde would take the edge off.”

“You gotta be kidding.” With a quick laugh, Harrisch shook his head. “You’re talking ancient history. Nobody makes that stuff anymore. There’s no money in it.” The DZ pharmaceutical division worked full shifts every quarter, tagging different atoms on their old formulas, generating new patentables one step ahead of the knockoff communes down in Belize. “And morphine,” he mused aloud. “Jeez…” Years ago, routine shots from the commercial rent-a-spy satellites had passed across Harrisch’s desk. Sand and airborne rust drifted through the withered Afghani and Southeast Asian opium fields, the dry poppy stalks victims of Sahara-like desertification and market-demand shifts profounder than any changes in global weather patterns. “You’ll have to update your habits, if that’s what you’re into.”

“I’ve found a new kick.” Rainwater dripped from the bottom of McNihil’s coat; a few clear drops clung to his waxy face. “Over at that little establishment you sent me to.”

“Ah.” Harrisch nodded, a degree of satisfaction cutting the unease the hospital evoked in him. “You’ve been talking to the good doctor. You must have found him to be… helpful.”

“Very.”

Harrisch leaned forward, examining the other man’s face more closely. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I was hoping for rather better results than this. I can still see you. I mean… if I look away from you…” He shifted his gaze to the corridor wall as if to demonstrate, then looked back toward McNihil. “Then I’ve still got a clear picture of you in my mind. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“We’re not done yet.” McNihil rubbed the side of his face; he looked like somebody just risen from the dentist’s chair, flesh numbed by Novocain. Harrisch wondered if the guy was feeling any pain at all, or whether that had been all talk for sympathy. “Your doctor just got started,” said McNihil. “There’s a time gap between the first setup and the final stages. Just enough time, actually, for me to take care of a little business. Like coming over here to talk to you.”

“What’s there to talk about? You know what your job is.”

“True enough.” McNihil gave a slight nod. “But maybe we need to talk about payment.”

You poor stupid bastard -Harrisch tried to keep pity out of his own gaze. For people to get paid, they had to be alive after the job was done. He hadn’t even bothered filling out a petty-cash voucher on McNihil’s account.

“No need to worry,” said Harrisch. “You’ll be taken care of.”

He didn’t expect a smile from McNihil, and he didn’t get one. “Let’s go in here and talk.” McNihil pushed open the door to one of the burn ward’s intensive-care chambers.

“You know… I don’t find this a good working atmosphere.” Harrisch had let himself be shepherded into the cramped space, as though the other man’s suggestion had held some inarguable force. As the door sealed shut behind them, he’d started to find it hard to breathe the filtered air, his lungs binding from some deep atavistic dread. “Maybe we could find someplace else… like down in the cafeteria or something…”

“Don’t let it get to you.” In the room’s semidarkness, McNihil stood right behind him, voice whispering almost directly into his ear. “Somebody getting traumatically connected-up is just a natural part of life. It’s no big deal.”

“Easy for you to say.” Harrisch felt nausea moving around in his guts like a wet rat. The sonuvabitch probably wasn’t even aware of the burn-ward chamber, experiencing it, in anything close to its dismal reality. In that other world inside McNihil’s eyes, the whole hospital probably looked like some benign and comforting environment, with white-suited doctors with stethoscopes dangling around their necks, nurses with air-pillow shoes and wing-starched hats, all trotting around dispensing their healing mercies. He doesn’t see , thought Harrisch with a sudden rush of envy. The medical technicians in their full moon-suit antibiocontamination gear, square faceplates tinted dark and unidentifiable, moving around a factory with anesthetized bodies for workstations, shadowed by the similarly masked insurance agents and HMO accountants with their key-membrane clipboards and expenditure-review videocams, whispering on tight-link headsets with the cold-eyed financial triage nurses monitoring the taxi-meter gauges on the respirators and other clicking, sighing pieces of life-support equipment-the corridors were so thick with the cash-cure-or-kill types that it was amazing that the reality-blind McNihil could even make his way past them.

And what did he see on the other side of the transparent infection barrier? Some old-fashioned hospital bed, probably, with a crank at the footboard and a paper chart with a hand-drawn red line, a jagged little mountain range, hanging from a hook. And in the bed, something else from those crappy old movies that nobody watched anymore, a human form wrapped up head-to-toe in white bandages like a mummy, de-sexed, depersonalized, even somewhat funny-looking, a joke thing…

“This her?” McNihil nodded toward whatever it was he did see.

Involuntarily, as though his own head were fastened to a gently tugged wire, Harrisch looked at the living and mechanical aggregate on the other side of the barrier. Just enough of the human part’s charred flesh showed, glistening with an antiseptic nurturant gel, to start Harrisch’s stomach climbing into his throat.